Bureaucrats Do Their Stuff for Fake Quake

Potentates of public service got together in a Santa Ana Civic Center cellar Thursday morning to play make-believe.

There was a deputy director from the county Fire Department, a lieutenant from the sheriff’s office and a whole lot of top-drawer bureaucrats from the CHP and a bunch of other departments that go by three letters.

All these people pretended there was a big earthquake outside and that they had to decide what to do about it. They also pretended that despite the make-believe disaster they were able to make their way to the basement to take charge.

The scene was repeated throughout Southern California Thursday as public officials staged a phony earthquake, complete with phony injuries, phony school evacuations and phony rescues to prepare for when the Big One really hits. Orange County theoretically was spared the full force of the 9:03 a.m. imaginary quake that registered 8.3 on the Richter scale along its epicenter on the San Andreas Fault. But experts estimate that a quake of that magnitude would kill as many as 10,000 and injure another 40,000 in the Southern California region.

Messages in Triplicate

Responding to the mock emergency, those in charge in the Santa Ana basement first gave everybody a desk. The more potent potentates also got telephones. (Later, some of them unashamedly complained that they didn’t have secretaries.)

The next thing they did was require that all messages coming in and going out of the basement must be written on official forms. It was no surprise that each message had to be at least in triplicate.

“We’ve got three copy machines functioning and if they go down, we’re in big trouble,” observed Paul Hess, director of one of the three-letter agencies, the Emergency Management Division (EMD).

The photocopy machines, which in a real disaster would be powered by auxiliary generators, faithfully churned out heaps of messages, which ostensibly had been radioed or telephoned to the bunker-like command center. Nevertheless, many basement bureaucrats complained that they didn’t get copies of all the messages.

Sheriff Lt. Larry Khune complained that he did get a message that elephants had escaped from a circus. Stuff like that, he said, should come over the 911 line and be handled by watch commanders and dispatchers.

Noisy Basement

Larry Holms, acting county chief administrative officer, diplomatically explained that one purpose of the drill was to practice “prioritizing” when relatively minor incidents get mixed in with more important bulletins.

In the basement Thursday, “prioritizing” was a word heard as often as “earthquake” and even more often than “huh?” And in that basement it got very noisy at times and a lot of people said “huh?”

The imaginary scenario that set all this in motion went like this:

Traffic had backed up on the 405 Freeway from the Los Angeles County line to the I-5. Throughout the county, phone lines were busy or out of order. A lot of citizens seeking help had mistakenly telephoned the business numbers of emergency offices instead of dialing 911. A river of paper work flowed from one bureaucrat to another. There was an unknown chemical spill on a major road.

So far it sounded like a typical Thursday morning.

The pretended bad news got worse as the morning wore on in the county’s basement nerve center.

Prisoners Evacuated

A landslide closed the 91 Freeway at Green River Golf Club. Holy Sepulcher Cemetery reported a “need to rebury the dead” because “severe ground movement” unearthed coffins. The Sheriff’s Department was assessing damage to the jail, where hundreds of prisoners might have to be evacuated by bus. A collapsed overpass and bridge in the south county killed 150 and injured another 723.

Decisions had to be made. Firefighters and police were dispatched then redirected. Help was requested from surrounding jurisdictions. Roads were ordered closed. Command posts were ordered set up.

Would it be better to ask for large helicopters from San Diego or use the more readily available, but smaller sheriff’s helicopters to shuttle medical personnel into the county?

“This is problem solving, basically,” Hess explained. “A brain trust exercise.”

After assessing the morning’s work, Holms concluded that it had given “us a chance to make those kinds of mistakes now” rather than during a real earthquake.

On the whole, he said, the exercise was successful in preparing the county agencies for the inevitable on this, the 79th anniversary of the quake that nearly leveled San Francisco and killed 700.